The metaphor of carrying grief like a heavy rock is clear from the first page. The tasks of eating, sleeping and withdrawing from life are graphically depicted in simple, gentle images, but always with survival on the horizon, and the prospect of enjoying life once more.
Todd-Stanton’s picturebook shows the impact on a child’s life when uprooted from the home they love. A father and his little girl, Nyla, leave their home by the sea for a new life in the city. The comet becomes the imaginative link between Nyla’s old and new life with landscape and sky featuring heavily.
Making friends is a tricky business. What makes one person like another? The deceptively simple storyline of this book helps to explain how friendships begin. Here is a story with diversity at its heart. Five very different bears meet: black bear, curly bear, black and white grunty bear, a very big brown bear, and a stuck-up white bear. Do they know one another? No, they have never met. Do they like one another? Not particularly. In fact, their indifference to one another is marked.
